08/25/2026
Disgraceful
BREAKING: ANTI-WOKE HYSTERIA — Trump officials rip down an Obama portrait artist's painting from a U.S. embassy, call it "aesthetically terrifying," and now want to sell it off.
Kehinde Wiley is a world renowned painter whose fine art has been featured in museums across the globe, but who is perhaps best known for his official portrait of President Barrack Obama exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait gallery.
His paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction and in galleries, so it wasn’t a surprise when Virginia Shore, the chief curator of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program during the Obama administration, commissioned him in 2013 to create a painting to hang in the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic.
As he typically does, Wiley took his inspiration from the old masters while also studying paintings by celebrated Dominican artists and working with young art students in the country to complete the painting which was entitled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960.”
Cut to 2026, with Donald Trump in the White House, and suddenly the State Department has decided to simply yank the taxpayer-funded painting from the walls of the embassy for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with artistic taste and everything to do with racism and anti-woke hysteria.
Providing little justification for the removal, it seems that the work of this gay, Black American artist was the victim of an attitude among the newly MAGA-fied State Department that a painting by an artist that they don't like who once painted Obama doesn’t belong in an official US facility.
Erin Scavino, the new director of the State Department's Art in Embassies program and not-so-coincidently the wife of White House Personnel Director Dan Scavino, called it "very woke" and "aesthetically terrifying" on a podcast. U.S. Ambassador Leah Campos celebrated the removal on Instagram with a video set to "We're Not Gonna Take It," declaring the painting represented "globalist and woke ideologies."
Neither woman ever actually explained what about a portrait of Dominican art students is "globalist" or objectionable — because there isn't a coherent answer. When pressed for an official statement, the State Department didn't even attempt to critique the painting itself, instead pivoting to attack Wiley personally over a years-old comment about a different artwork and unproven sexual assault allegations he denies. Now the administration wants to determine if it can legally SELL the painting outright.
Virginia Shore, the program's former director, pushed back directly: "Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand. This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush." Wiley himself received a State Department award in 2015 specifically for his contributions to cultural diplomacy — the exact mission this program exists to serve.
Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. Scavino has reportedly taken credit for getting an ambassador fired over "satanic baby art," installed an unqualified friend to run the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and organized a Washington exhibition featuring nearly 70 American flags under the banner "Make Art Great Again."
This is what cultural diplomacy looks like when it's reduced to petty ideological purity tests: erasing Black artists, punishing any connection to Obama, and replacing genuine artistic exchange with flag-waving propaganda — all funded by the same taxpayers whose embassy walls are being stripped bare.
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